Fear Read Free

suburban wastelands.
    War was far from our thoughts. To imagine it, we had to refer back to History, to what little we knew of it. This was reassuring. For History offered us a past packed with glorious wars, great victories and ringing declarations, with a cast of remarkable and celebrated figures: Charles Martel,[ 7 ] Charlemagne, Saint Louis[ 8 ] sitting under an oak tree on his return from Palestine, Joan of Arc who kicked the English out of France, the hypocrite Louis XI who put people in cages while kissing his devotional medals, the gallant Francois I (‘All is lost save honour’), Henri IV, good-natured and cynical (‘A kingdom is well worth a Mass’[ 9 ]), the majestic Louis XIV, prolific producer of bastards, indeed all our skirt-lifting, jingoist kings, our eloquent revolutionaries, and Bayard, Jean Bart, Condé, Turenne, Moreau, Hoche, Masséna . . . And towering over them all, the mirage of Napoleon, in which the brilliant Corsican looms through the cannon smoke in his simple military uniform surrounded by his marshals, his dukes, his princes, his scarlet kings, in all their plumes and finery.
    It must be said that after bothering all of Europe with our turbulence over so many centuries we have calmed down with age. But if anyone should dare to challenge us, we are ready for them . . . And now the die is cast, we must go to war! We are not afraid, to war we will go. We are still French, are we not?
    Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.
    Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible. They die the victims of their own stupid docility.
    When you have seen war as I have just seen it, you ask yourself: ‘How can we put up with such a thing? What frontier traced on a map, what national honour could possibly justify it? How can what is nothing but banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?’
    They told the Germans: ‘Forward to a bright and joyous war! On to Paris! God is with us, for a greater Germany!’ And the good, peaceful Germans, who take everything seriously, set forth to conquer, transforming themselves into savage beasts.
    They told the French: ‘The nation is under attack. We will fight for Justice and Retribution. On to Berlin!’ And the pacifist French, the French who take nothing at all seriously, interrupted their modest little rentier reveries to go and fight.
    So it was with the Austrians, the Belgians, the English, the Russians, the Turks, and then the Italians. In a single week, twenty million men, busy with their lives and loves, with making money and planning a future, received the order to stop everything to go and kill other men. And those twenty million individuals obeyed the order because they had been convinced that this was their duty .
    Twenty million, all in good faith, following God and their prince . . . twenty million idiots . . . like me!
    Or rather, no, I did not believe this was my duty. Nineteen years old and I had not yet come to believe that there was anything great or noble in sticking a bayonet into a man’s stomach, in rejoicing in his death.
    But I went all the same.
    Because it would have been hard for me to do anything else? No, that is not the real reason and I should not make myself out to be better than I am. I went against all my convictions, but still of my own free will – not to fight but out of curiosity: to see.
    Through my own behaviour I can explain that of a great many others, especially in France.
    In just a few hours, war turned everything upside down, spread the semblance of disorder everywhere – something the French always enjoy. They set off without any hatred at all, drawn by an adventure from which everything could be expected. The weather was lovely. This war was breaking out right at the beginning of August. Ordinary